Emma Lord

Winter in Alpine should be quiet, but the town is humming. At the Alpine Advocate, editor Emma Lord and her staff are on deadline with a feature about the opening of RestHaven, a new rehab and mental health facility. Front Street is buzzing with gossip about Emma's recent engagement to Sheriff Milo Dodge. And now that fool Wayne Eriks has climbed an electric pole in the middle of a storm and got himself electrocuted. Sheriff Dodge doesn't buy the idea that Wayne's death is an accident.

An ill wind blows through Alpine, but Advocate publisher Emma Lord and Sheriff Milo Dodge seem immune to the prevailing angst. The newlyweds' domestic idyll is most definitely over when a dead man is discovered near the fish hatchery and nobody has a clue as to his identity. Moreover, whispers of scandal travel through the quaint streets when some high school girls mysteriously take a walk on the wild side. And then Milo's dedicated deputy, Sam Heppner, a true yeoman, suddenly goes AWOL.

As an early summer heat wave beats down on Alpine, Emma and her staff are treading very lightly. For unfathomable reasons, the paper's House & Home editor, Vida Runkel, is in a major snit, refusing to speak to her colleagues. So when a peculiar young woman walks in claiming her parents have been murdered and that she's in mortal danger, too, it fits right in with the rest of the craziness. Then, to the utter bafflement of her colleagues, Vida vanishes without a word to anyone.

For a small town nestled in the Cascade Mountains' foothills, picturesque Alpine provides more than enough headlines to fill the pages of editor and publisher Emma Lord's Alpine Advocate. The Labor Day edition's lead story features controversial timber baron Jack Blackwell's scheme to become Skykomish county manager, but the recent strangling deaths of two young women are all anyone can talk about.

A woman’s body has been found in a squalid motel. Her driver’s license shows that Dawn Purvis was in her late 30s and lived in Weaverville, California - and the only connection between that town and Alpine is their gold-mining and logging origins. Emma, Milo, and the ever-inquisitive Alpine Advocate receptionist, Alison Lindahl, are curious, though Alison is a bit distracted by the new county extension agent’s good looks. Meanwhile, there’s something strange about the older couple who have moved into the cabin down the road that was once owned by a murder victim.